Electricity network operators in Germany: Blockages and conflicts in network connections

Nothing works in Germany without the power grid. But its operators are increasingly resisting new systems - and are increasingly drawing the ire of companies and private individuals.

Dusseldorf. Electricity network operators are causing more and more conflict and frustration in Germany. The disputes affect thousands of operators of wind farms, solar systems and battery storage systems, but also industrial companies, data centers and private households.

It's about systems that wait months for a network connection, about errors when registering new electricity meters - but above all about the fact that electricity customers simply don't get through to the network operators with their concerns.

Thorsten Müller from the Environmental Energy Law Foundation says: "Grid operators are monopolists. Everyone who needs a grid connection depends on working with them." This creates a power asymmetry.

Customers and companies feel this power imbalance. The sales manager of the electricity provider Rabot Energy, Konrad Schade, says of the electricity network operator Westnetz: “The network operator plays completely dead when we ask him to solve customer problems with us.”

And lawyer Heidrun Schalle from the law firm Aecoute reports: "Many electricity network operators simply no longer respond to inquiries from solar and wind farm operators. It's as if they were sitting in a bunker, waiting for new laws to relieve them of all the grid connection requests."

Thousands of projects are waiting for a grid connection

An evaluation by the consulting firm AFRY shows the extent of the problem. Accordingly, wind power projects with a total output of 43 gigawatts could be built if they did not still wait for a grid connection. For comparison: Germany currently has a total of 68 gigawatts of wind power installed on land.

But more and more projects have to wait. The German Solar Industry Association conducted a representative survey of project developers who would like to build a combination of large battery storage and a PV system. 63 percent of those surveyed received either a rejection from the network operators, no response at all or the information that no network connection would be possible before the end of 2028.

The electricity grid operators, for their part, complain that they cannot connect all of the new systems to the grid at the same time. You are overwhelmed by the number of requests. The result is apparently increasingly a radical defensive attitude.

Lawsuits through multiple instances

A court case shows how great the resistance of network operators can be. Those involved want to remain anonymous, but report on what happened: A wind farm operator demanded grid access, but was supposed to settle for a connection point that was 80 kilometers away from the wind farm.

The wind farm operator's lawyer says: "For my client, that would mean that he would have to build a power line there himself for almost a three-digit million sum, which would probably take more than eight years."

The wind farm operator demanded in court that a closer grid connection point be assigned to him. He won in two instances - but he still doesn't have a connection.

The lawyer says: "The judgment is legally binding and the party concerned usually accepts this in a constitutional state. But the network operator has not yet taken the judgment into account."

The wind farm operator then applied for a penalty payment. Discussions with the network operator have now taken place at management level.

“Our line is full”

The procedure is not an isolated case. A spokesman for the Frankfurt an der Oder regional court told Handelsblatt that the court is currently dealing with a handful of such processes. That's a lot for the court. The spokesman said: "This is a new phenomenon. My colleagues didn't know about it before."

The President of the Federal Association of Renewable Energy, Ursula Heinen-Esser, also confirms that such problems are increasingly becoming the norm: "Delays in grid connection are not a peripheral problem of individual, particularly complex projects. When it comes to wind and solar parks, it is always about long processing times for grid operators, a lack of transparency about available capacities and grid connection points, some of which are far away from the project location."

Above all, it is the impression of arbitrariness that causes frustration among many renewable energy operators. The wind farm operator Hellweg Wind is currently arguing in court with the grid operator Avacon because the latter does not want to grant him access to the nearest grid connection.

Hellweg Wind managing director Steffen Lackmann, who also sits on the executive board of the BEE interest group, complains: “The network operator simply says: ‘Our line is full’ without providing transparent and comprehensible network data to prove this.”

Even more frustrating for Lackmann: In this case, the network operator won the dispute in the first instance. Avacon now refers to this ruling and told Handelsblatt that Hellweg Wind is not entitled to the requested information.

The network operators, like the wind farm operators, shy away from the effort of connecting a distant wind farm to the power grid. An Avacon spokesman says: "Some areas are far from the power grid. This makes implementation difficult for project developers and grid operators alike and may require significant additional investments."

Great incentive to delay grid connections

There is now concern in the renewables industry that the legal situation for them will get even worse in the future. The federal government has presented two amendments to the law, which the Bundestag wants to discuss in the coming days.

It's about the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and the grid connection package. To date, network operators have been obliged to grant network connections to operators of renewable energies - even if the electricity network has to be optimized or expanded.

The amendments are intended to change that. The obligation should no longer apply to capacity-limited network areas - i.e. areas in which the electricity network is already heavily utilized. A large part of the network areas in Germany could be declared such areas in the future.

Instead of the previous connection obligation, network operators will in future only have the obligation to offer a contract. For example, it could say that solar or wind farm operators are only allowed to feed in a portion of their electricity. This means relief for the network operators - and often the economic end for renewable energy projects.

The lawyer Thorsten Müller says: “There are no economic advantages for network operators to connect additional systems to their network.” Instead, they would incur effort and costs. “Therefore, from an economic point of view, the network operators have a great incentive to delay such a network connection or to make it disadvantageous for the other side.”

Billing problems for thousands of households

The problem threatens to affect large parts of the country - because grid operator conflicts do not only occur in commercial energy transition projects. Thousands of private households are also affected.

If you install a solar system on your roof and get a dynamic electricity tariff, you can save on electricity costs and even earn money. Electricity can then be used specifically when it is cheap on the stock exchange - and the electricity from your own solar system can be sold profitably on the market. But all of this only works if the network operator cooperates.

To take advantage of the new possibilities, households need a smart electricity meter. Many companies offer customers the installation of such devices. However, this only benefits the customer if the network operator registers the new devices correctly - and at this point the projects often fail.

The electricity providers Rabot Energy, Tibber, Octopus and Ostrom are so annoyed that on Thursday they wrote a joint complaint letter to the management of the electricity network operator Westnetz, where, according to them, problems occur particularly frequently. The letter is available to the Handelsblatt.

Rabot manager Konrad Schade says: “Around seven percent of our customers have had billing problems for over a year because Westnetz does not register the electricity meters correctly.”

Westnetz is one of the largest network operators in Germany and, like the network operators involved in the legal proceedings, is a subsidiary of the Eon group, which always describes itself as the “playmaker of the energy transition”. Electricity customers and electricity providers are all the more frustrated that such powerful network operators are, in their view, blocking the energy transition in many places.

Things often work better with smaller network operators, says Rabot manager Schade. "There are also other network operators who have problems with changing electricity meters - but this can usually be resolved quickly with them. Westnetz, on the other hand, ignores all of our messages." Westnetz does not even respond to personal letters of complaint from managing director to managing director.

Westnetz was at least conciliatory towards the Handelsblatt. A spokesman emphasized that there are currently only problems with around one percent of Rabot, Tibber, Octopus and Ostrom customers on the Westnetz side. However, he also admitted that Westnetz had already set up additional teams to address the problems and that delays or effort for customers and market partners did not correspond to Westnetz's standards: "We apologize for that."